AN amateur treasure-hunter could be in for a bumper pay-day after finding a 350-year-old coin which is expected to sell for more than £1 million at auction.
John Stoner, from Worksop, discovered the silver threepenny coin in a farmer's field in King's Clipstone.
The extremely rare New England coin, bearing the date 1652, has been hailed as one of the finest examples of a currency produced in the days of the Pilgrim Fathers in a land that would become the United States.
Mr Stoner, who temporarily mislaid the coin at one point, found it while on an outing with the Coil To The Soil metal detector club, according to the Daily Mail.
The 42-year-old father of two had only just started to sweep an area of the ploughed field when he picked up two signals from the detector.
The first was from a random piece of metal; the second was from an uneven, hand-hammered coin, about the size of a modern 1p but thinner, buried five inches deep.
He said: "I dug up the soil and out it popped,' he said of the historic find.
"At first I didn't think it was anything special. I knew it wasn't English, but just how important a find it was, I didn't have a clue."
The club posted a picture of the coin on its Facebook page and within minutes followers had identified it.
One enthusiast wrote: "Your mate has just won the lottery!"
That evening Mr Stoner took it home, put it in a jar and showed it to friends.
In the morning, he knocked the jar over and temporarily lost it.
After finding it again, coin expert Peter Spencer confirmed it was a genuine threepenny piece from the first authorised colonial coinage, commissioned and struck in Boston, Massachusetts.
Because it is a single coin, it is not subject to treasure trove laws which mean finds have to be reported to a coroner and handed to the Crown.
